exploded from within, the weight and strength of a hundred assaulters precipitating their violent descents. Wooden slats everywhere came apart, and where they did not, maniacal hands prised them apart. Then, like starving locusts attacking the sweet leaves of trees, the terrorists of South Yemen and the Baaka Valley crawled over the crates, yanking out weapons from their plastic casements and throwing them to their brothers while shrieking and straddling the large cartons that took on the grotesque images of coffins.
Simultaneously, the Palestinian team from the West Bank heaved boxes of ammunition all around and over the collapsed wooden mountain of death, supplied by the seller of death, Abdel Hamendi. The guns were varied, all types and all sizes, ripped with abandon from their soft recesses. Many did not know what shells went into which weapons, but many others, mainly from the Baaka, did, and they instructed their less sophisticated brothers from South Yemen.
The first repeating machine gun that was fired in triumph from atop the ersatz pyramid of death blew off the face of the one who pulled the trigger. In the midst of staccato sounds everywhere, others were fired; there were several hundred fruitless clicks, but also dozens of explosions where heads and arms and hands were blown away. Blown away!
Hysteria fed upon hysteria. Terrorists threw down their guns in terror, while others used their hands and whatever implements they could find to prise open the unmarked crates everywhere. It was as the young sultan of Oman had predicted. Items of equipment were dragged out all over the pier, yanked from boxes and unfolded or pulled apart or ripped from their plastic casings… and displayed for all to see. As each piece was examined, the crowds went wilder and wilder, but no longer in triumph, instead in animal fury. Among the items were infrared binoculars with smashed lenses, rope ladders with their rungs severed, grappling hooks without points, underwater oxygen tanks with holes drilled in the cylinders; flamethrowers, their nozzles crushed together guaranteeing instant incineration to whoever operated them and anyone within thirty yards; rocket missile launchers without detonating caps, and again, as Ahmat had projected, landing craft held up to show where the seams had been split, all of which threw the manic crowd into paroxysms of rage over the betrayal.
In the chaos, Evan weaved through the hysterical bodies to the warehouse at the midpoint of the huge pier; he pressed his back against the wall and sidestepped to within three feet of the massive open doors. The white-suited Hamendi was shouting in Arabic that everything would be replaced; his and their enemies in the Bahrain depots who did this would be killed, every one killed! His protestations drew looks of narrow-eyed suspicion from those he addressed.
And then a man in a dark conservative pinstriped suit appeared rounding the corner of the warehouse and Kendrick froze. It was Crayton Grinell, attorney and chairman of the board for the government within the government. After his initial shock, Evan wondered why he was astonished, even surprised. Where else could Grinell go but to the core of the international network of arms merchants? It was his last and only secure refuge. The lawyer spoke briefly to Hamendi, who instantly translated Grinell's words, explaining that his associate had already contacted Bahrain and learned what had happened. It was Jews! he exclaimed. Israeli terrorists had assaulted an island depot, killed all the men on watch, and done these terrible things.
'How could that be?' asked a stocky man in the only pressed revolutionary uniform replete with at least a dozen medals. 'All these supplies were in the original crates, even boxes within cartons, the casings unbroken. How could it be?'
'The Jews can be ingenious!' screamed Hamendi. 'You know that as well as I do. I shall fly back immediately, replace the entire order, and learn the truth!'
'What do we do in the meantime?' asked the obvious leader of South Yemen's revolutionary regime. 'What do I tell our brothers from the Baaka Valley? We are all, all of us, disgraced!'
'You will have your vengeance as well as your weapons, be assured.' Grinell spoke again to the arms merchant, and once more Hamendi translated. 'I am informed by my associate that our radar clearances are only in effect for the next three hours—at an extraordinary expense to me personally, I might add—and we must leave at once.'
'Restore us our dignity, fellow Arab, or we will find you and you will lose your life.'
'You have my guarantee that the first will happen, and there will be no necessity for the second. I leave.'
They were going to get away! thought Kendrick. Goddamn it, they were going to get away! Grinell had given Hamendi the unctuous words, and both of them were going to fly out of this hub of insanity and go on doing their insane, obscene business-as-usual! He had to stop them. He had to move!
